What You Need to Know About Adobe Photoshop Software

Adobe Photoshopis popularly known as Photoshop. It is image manipulation software developed by Adobe Systems. Adobe is seen to be the market leader in commercial image manipulation software. Photoshop seems to be the de facto standard when it comes to graphics software. Photoshop is the flagship product of Adobe. Photoshop was coded with C++. There are many graphics and image manipulation software out there, and you may want to research your specific needs before settling on any one product.

The current version of Photoshop is CS4. It has many new features; in particular, there is a boost in capabilities for working with three-dimensional objects. You are now able to wrap 2D images around 3D shapes.

The story of Photoshop begins in the year 1987. Thomas Knoll was a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan. He was writing a program on his Macintosh for displaying grayscale images on monochrome displays. Thomas’s brother John seems to have suggested extending the program to a full featured image editing program. The two brothers worked on the software together. The first Photoshop version was released in 1990 for the Apple Mac. In 1992 Photoshop was released for MS Windows. It was then ported to Unix and Linux platforms as well.

Photoshop seems to be integrated with other Adobe software well. This other Adobe software does media editing, authoring, and animation. It’s easy to transfer files produced by one application to another as long as they are both Adobe products.

Photoshop works with pixels which are individual picture elements. The other product Adobe Illustrator uses vectors that are lines, points and curves described using mathematical equations. Photoshop can use color models like grayscale and RGB (red green blue). It can write and read popular image formats including GIF, JPEG, PNG, EPS, and fireworks. It has many native file formats. The PSD (Photoshop Document) format stores an image with all its features and the PSB (Large Document Format) is designed for files larger than 2 GB. Products that compete with Photoshop usually have the ability to work with .PSD files as the PSD format are very popular indeed.

The CS4 Photoshop is available in major languages of the world including Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, and Japanese. Users of Hebrew or Arabic versions can mix right-to-left text with left-to-right text.

Adobe also markets software called Adobe Photoshop Elements that seems to be more consumer-oriented. It costs lesser and is more user-friendly. It sports new tools like ‘red-eye’ reduction brush and is clearly pitched at amateur photographers and home users. Depending on your image editing needs, you may need a professional version such as CS3 or CS4. One software size usually does not fit all.